Wednesday, July 9, 2014

If a fish falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it … wait,
is that not how it goes
Let’s put it this way: If a fishing boat
illegally scoops up a load of fish in the middle of the ocean and no one
is there to see it, it’s still illegal — but until now there has not
been much anyone could do about it.

It turns out that satellites a few hundred miles above earth are a
lot better at surveying the high seas than, say, a lone Coast Guard boat
with a spyglass, especially in the most remote waters where fishermen
may be used to acting with impunity — ignoring quotas, transferring fish
from ship to ship, dumping bycatch, even changing the vessel’s name
between ports like a Shakespearian youth slipping casually into drag.
Thanks to new projects in high-powered satellite surveillance, it may be
possible to put an end to pirate fishing once and for all.

A Taiwanese-flagged fishing vessel suspected of illegal fishing that was stopped and boarded by the US Navy in 2009.

This is good news for, let me see, about a billion people.
Illegal fishing takes as much as 26 million metric tons of fish from
the sea every year, or about 1 in 5 fish sold, for a grand theft of
$23.5 billion total (or, to put it yet another way, almost 16 times the GDP of Belize or a mere seventh of the market value of Facebook).
That’s money that doesn’t go to the fishermen who play by the rules,
while lawbreakers put pressure on already overfished stocks like tuna
and swordfish.
And while illegal fishing has been getting a lot of press
– notably, President Obama issued a memo on
the subject last month — it’s hard to make a real dent in it without
some serious international cooperation.
Ships need to be traceable as
they travel from one country’s maritime oversight into another’s, and
enforcement needs to be stern enough that the risks of fishing illegally
outweigh the rewards.

To this end, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Ending Illegal Fishing Project teamed up with Oxford-based group Satellite Application Catapult to turn an all-seeing eye to
the problem of piracy.
By combining satellite-gathered signals from
ship transponders with other data, whether crowdsourced or supplied by
fishing enforcement agencies, Catapult can piece together a cheat sheet
that identifies any vessel by name history, ID number, and the details
of its fishing license.

Once the relevant authorities have access to that information, they
will be able to spot illegal or unreported fishing in even the most
remote areas, then zoom in to make the arrest.
That big Ukranian ship
hanging out in the marine protected area?
Probably not a tourist.

This pilot project from Catapult is the latest in a string of tools
Pew has thrown at the problem of illegal and unreported fishing.
Last
year, the group partnered with a small but spunky nonprofit located in
West Virginia, SkyTruth, to use open-source satellite data to detect and
document illegal fishing around Easter Island, a smidge of an island in
a tuna-rich corner of the South Pacific, about 2,000 miles off the
Chilean coast.

SkyTruth, under the guidance of geologist John Amos, had previously
made its name collecting satellite images of mountaintop removal in
Appalachia, fracking wells in Pennsylvania, and a certain infamous oil spill in the Gulf.
But
while publicly available satellite imagery are a great resource if you
know where to look (as in, look roughly where the mountain used to be),
it is too expensive and time-consuming to scrutinize every visible mile
of the ocean’s surface (turns out, the world is BIG).
So Amos and co.
turned instead to other publicly available satellite data to tell them
when and where to look for illegal fishing.

Most vessels have a transponder system, called an Automatic
Identification System, that sends and receives little declarative pings
to help ships avoid collisions.
It just so happens that these pings can
be intercepted by orbiting satellites, leaving a trail as a single ship
pings its way across the sea.
The only problem is that fishing boats can
easily send fake identifying information through their transponders, or
shut them off altogether.
Sometimes fishermen do this just to keep
other fishermen from getting wind of a good spot, but often it’s for
more nefarious reasons.
In any case, all the untraceable boats taken
together are sometimes called, rather imperiously, the “dark fleet.”
Without reliable IDs, the SkyTruth team instead tried to narrow in on
the likely suspects by using low-res radar imagery to detect the
presence of a ship, and sometimes even its speed and direction, then
cross-referencing that with the transponder signal (or lack thereof).
The boats that did not identify themselves and could not otherwise be
accounted for, SkyTruth surmised, were probably up to no good.

After a year of watching Easter Island, SkyTruth had enough data to
estimate the total amount of fishing that was going on, and had singled
out more than 40 unidentified vessels that had been unknown to Chilean maritime authorities.

As for Pew’s collaboration with Catapult, the aim is to take this
kind of monitoring global, pumped up with some extra data not available
to civilian groups like SkyTruth and made affordable for every country.
There are some policy measures needed to cinch the deal – confirmation
that vessels are all ID’ed with a unique code from shipyard to scrapyard, measures to ensure accountability in ports,
etc – but the final, crucial step is to supplement the proverbial stick
of increased enforcement with the carrot of higher profits (yum).
Tony
Long, director of Pew’s Ending Illegal Fishing Project, put it this way:
“The vast majority of fishermen want to fish legally.” So why not give
them a way to prove they’re doing it?

If retail chains demand traceability from their suppliers, and can
promise them a premium price at the counter, then it’s in fishermen’s
best interest to opt into a monitoring system.
Instead of putting the
onus on enforcement agencies, this is a way to shift the burden of proof
to the fishermen who want to do business legitimately.
Then, if the
good guys keep their transponders on, it will be even easier to spot
shady behavior from afar.
(You get a better ocean! You get a better ocean! Everybody gets a better ocean!)

Here I will utter environmentalists’ tepid catchphrase: All this
is not going to happen overnight — but it is happening all the same.
The
Catapult project is in advanced test stages before its official launch.
Amos believes there will be enough satellite coverage to generate a
complete, uninterrupted picture of all the fishing in the world’s oceans
in as little as three years.
SkyTruth is currently working with
nonprofit Oceana and Google to visualize all the vessel tracking data
available — that should launch at the end of the summer, and give
internet dabblers a more immediate sense of the ways humans move around
the ocean.
“Just getting people to see this stuff is an incredibly powerful
gateway drug,” Amos said.
Which, if you like narcotic metaphors, is a
pretty good one for the kind of citizen science that satellites have
made possible.

Links :

PewTrusts : Pew Joins With Top European Satellite Innovators to Fight Illegal Fishing